Devil You Know

Family Stuff.

“Come on Luca, I know you can do it,” Elsa was pleading with the young vampire, “It’s really important to me.”

“Why must it be a secret?” Luca asked. He was suspicious and rightly so, Elsa had asked him to get her into Haven’s research system in such a way that she wouldn’t leave a trail, she didn’t want anyone to know what she had been looking at. He had shown himself to be amazing with anything technology related and his skills surpassed some of Haven’s top techs. Elsa knew he could do it; the problem was she didn’t want to tell him why she wanted him to do it.

“I really need to keep this to myself for now,” She said, trying to look as apologetic as possible, “I promise you it’s nothing sinister and I will go straight to my dad if I find anything he needs to know. I just don’t want to worry him until I know there’s something to be worried about.”

“Should I be worried?” Luca asked.

“Not at all, its kind of family stuff. Pretty please?”

Luca shrugged in defeat, “You make your pleases pretty, what can I do? I cannot say no to pretty.”

Elsa grinned, Luca liked to play to the Italian stereotype of being a bit of a lothario. She knew it was an act. He was a sweetheart and she looked on him like he was her little brother, “Thank you,” she said.

“Anything for you my sister,” he replied, his long, elegant fingers moving rapidly over the computer keyboard, “There, your history will be cleared automatically as you move through the system, it will take less than a second for each item you search or visit to be erased from the virtual record.”

“That’s perfect,” Elsa said, “It won’t look too obvious will it? I mean if anyone were to check for any reason wouldn’t they wonder how I spent the whole day in here on the computers and have no search history or record of what I was looking at?”

Luca gave her a withering look and muttered something in Italian that Elsa didn’t understand but she got the tone, “You’ve taken that into account haven’t you?” she said apologetically.

“Si,” Luca, “Your search parameters will only show as those which we have been told to search today, it will look like you are working very hard.” He smiled mischievously, “Well, not too hard, I do not want to give an unrealistic picture.”

Elsa stuck her tongue out at him but smiled back, “Thanks again, she said, “I owe you one.”

“You owe me many things,” Luca sighed, “Now I have to write this report myself.”

“I’ll make it up to you, name your price,” Elsa was already typing, her eyes fixed on the computer screen.

“Then I shall have to think carefully,” Luca said turning to his own computer to work.

Elsa wasn’t really sure where to start. Florence had implied that Vincent had been about to tell her something important when he died and the impression Elsa got was that it was something to do with her mother’s death. Florence had also stated that she had known Elsa’s mother yet Marcus had never mentioned her and she didn’t appear to affiliated with Haven in any way, Elsa had already checked that out. She’d tried talking to her dad about his life with Sarah, where and how they’d met, how long they’d been together. They had been together over ten years before Elsa was even born. They’d married in their twenties and had a lot of history together before Sarah had died. She’d had a small family who were very free spirited and were scattered all over the world. They didn’t really keep in touch, it wasn’t that they were estranged, they just weren’t a close family and Elsa had never met any of her relatives from her mother’s side. Marcus’s family was also small and his parents had died when he was a teenager. He and Sarah had been a very close couple, they were all the other one had. They had friends of course, many of them met through their work with Haven, which Marcus had come to through his parents who had both worked within the organization. Sarah had stumbled into her job due to her brilliance in biological science and a chance encounter with Hesper, but at no point in all the chats that Elsa had with her father about his life with her mother was Florence, or anyone resembling her mentioned.